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Short Stories, Irish literature, Classics, Modern Fiction and Contemporary Literary Fiction, The Japanese Novel and post Colonial Asian Fiction, Yiddish Literature, The Legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and quality historical novels are some of my Literary Interests

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Lick of the Lizard by Geraldine Mills-Guest Post by Valerie Sirr

The Irish Quarter: A Celebration of the Irish Short Story

A Guest Post by Valerie Sirr on the

debut collection of short stories by Geraldine Mills including

an interview with the author

Lick the Lizard by Geraldine Mills

I am very happy today to be able to present a guest post by Valerie Sirr on Geraldine Mills.

A native of Galway, Ireland Geraldine is a poet and short story writer with four collections of poetry and two of short fiction. Arlen House has published her short fiction collections, Lick of the Lizard (2005) and The Weight of Feathers(2007) which are available internationally from Syracuse University Press and taught at the University of Connecticut and Eastern Connecticut State University. Her poetry collections include Unearthing your Own(2001) and Toil the Dark Harvest (2004) which were published by Bradshaw Books, Cork. An Urgency of Stars,published by Arlen House, 2010 was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship. Arlen House was also the publisher of The Other Side of Longing, a collaboration with U.S. poet Lisa C.Taylor which was the Gerson Reading choice for the University of Connecticut April 2010

Guest Post by Valerie Sirr

Review of Lick of the
Lizard by Geraldine Mills

Valerie Sirr

Geraldine Mills’ debut collection of short
stories, ‘Lick of the Lizard’, published by Arlen House in 2005 contains her
Hennessy Award winning title story as well as other prize-winning stories.
Geraldine is a poet too and her love of words permeates the stories and is
evident in their titles, for example, ‘Word-Eater’, ‘Gift of Mouth’ and ‘Make my
Bed and Light the Light’ - a fragment of
a song lyric.

‘Lick of the Lizard’ is an honest story about jealousy
in a mother-daughter relationship when a mother is confronted with the signs of
aging while her daughter is glowing with youthful beauty. An ex lover of the
mother remarks on her daughter: ‘Her skin’s like yours was’, further provoking
the green-eyed monster. The idea of skin and its aging and shedding is used to
powerful and subtle effect in this beautifully realised story that demonstrates
this writer’s narrative skills.

‘Make my Bed and Light the Light’, is a story
about poverty and hardship that, filtered through the consciousness of a
distressed young girl, allows you to see the world from her shaky perspective, almost
as if she is a fragile bird like the ones her unfeeling aunt - and guardian
since the death of the girl’s mother - has such affection for. ‘Where’s your colour, girl?..Did your mother
wash it clear out of you, make you a standard canary with no song?’ The child’s
life is so strange and dysfunctional that the reader shares a sense of
instability that ends in a nightmarishly tragic image.

In ‘Walking Toby’, the protagonist’s world is
similarly shaken. The story begins: ‘Late at night the snakes come, slithering
their way into my mind, spitting their cowardice and despair onto me until I
want to scream out.’ Here we have another jarred reality – the reality of a
cancer ward and its inhabitants, where the unfortunate sufferers are divorced
from the comforts, physical and psychological, of their pre-cancer lives. There
is an image in this story of a woman walking the stand that holds her drip and
‘fix’ of drugs down a clinical hospital corridor that is a sad objective
correlative for how the woman longs for the companion she is now deprived of.

‘Word Eater’ reads like an allegory about the
life of a writer or poet or psychotherapist – someone empathic who attempts to
transform pain into something productive. It describes a faith healer of some
kind, a ‘sin eater’ who is visited by pilgrims from all over the world who come
to her to be ‘witnessed’ as they pour out their tales of woe. Words, paper, the
smell of ink (which enrages the healer’s sibling), syllables, ‘rosaries of
regret’ , ‘diphthongs, dactyls, those sweet iambs of love, the caesura of a
bitter word’ empty into this story until the healer, full up with them, ‘turns
them, reshapes them’ , and with the sensibility of an artist pours them onto
the page.

Symbols of words, stories and books occur again
in ‘Gift of Mouth’ where a lonely woman in a troubled marriage is transposed
into an exotic culture where she hears similarly troubled women: ‘The women
were still talking, they were talking ‘, trying to make sense of their stories
and finding themselves drawn to the ‘doctor’ . Women from high-rise apartments
and from caves in the Barranco go to this man out of curiosity or with ailments
or anxiety. This man is a sort of witch-doctor who seems to be able to read
into their unconscious minds and reconnect them with their lives as if they
were fictional characters who had lost their stories.

‘Meal of small buttons’ begins like a realist
story but we meet an odd pair of inseparable ‘sisters’ in Dublin who seem
ethereal and from another era in the
delicacy of their habits and language.
It begins to read like a magical tale especially in the way in which one
sister suddenly disappears over a cliff and in the description of their
childhood home where the ’leaning kitchen wall was held up by a tree trunk that
their father took home from his saw mills’ and a vivid passage where the dead
sister is quickly and enchantingly replaced.

Marital discord and the threat of violence seep
through the wall of one house into the dream home of another in ‘Osmosis’: a
story of marital disappointment and strife. The dream couple ‘tiptoed round our
own squall for fear it erupted into a full scale storm’ like next door, but in
the end their relationship seems about to ‘tumble down the quagmire of next
door’.

There is plenty of scathing, black humour in
‘Dry Bones Time’, an edgy and occasionally uncomfortable story about a
lascivious maiden aunt.The artful mise-en-scène of an Irish wedding-day
including aging relatives ‘hauled out for the day to show the others’ side that ‘anything you
can do I can do better’ is cuttingly accurate and highly entertaining.

There are more surreal moments in the real
trauma of woman who is aware she is being betrayed by her own sister in ‘World
of Trees’. She identifies strongly with a TV story of an amnesic woman who lost
sense of time and ‘the niceties of language’ and lived in a forest. She
imagines the woman ‘burrow into the ground, roll up her body like a squirrel
and wait til the earth turned...’

This elemental quality, the power of the
unconscious, the power of language and the failure of language, permeate and
pull the reader under the surface of the narratives. Some of the stories are
traditional, realist stories often with a touch of the surreal, and others are
like folktales or parables. It’s as if the writer keeps one foot on the ground
while delving into something deeper, more essential. I look forward to seeing how
these talents develop in other works by Geraldine Mills.

Interview by Valerie Sirr

The
cover on ‘Lick of the Lizard’ is a striking painting by artist Joan Hogan. It
reminds me of Turner’s semi-abstract late paintings. Did you choose it to echo
something about your work?

Joan’s Work is striking and I am very
privileged to have a friend who is such a stunning artist. You are right in
seeing the influence of Turner in the work as she has been influenced by the
great English master. I have admired Joan’s work for many years and worked with
her and her daughter on an exhibition called Triúr in 2004 which was very
successful. Though her paintings are
semi-abstract they are full of images for me and that is what excites me about
her work.

I first used her artwork on the cover of my
second poetry collection Toil the Dark
Harvest ( Bradshaw Books 2003) because it symbolises the constant change within the
world around us and the turmoil within the human spirit. I am drawn to the energos within her work as it demands us
to go beyond the ordinary and calls us to be witness to something new and
different. I feel the painting used here
as a cover image draws the reader into a different world which I hope my
stories do too.

I
enjoyed the mix of realist stories like ‘Lick of the Lizard’ and ‘Osmosis’
along with stories like ‘Word-Eater‘ and ‘Gift of Mouth’ which though they have
realist elements read like parable and folktale. Which kind of story do you
tend to write now or do you like to mix both approaches?

As you know stories have their beginnings
in the most diverse places. They come out of an image, a snatch of
conversation, something that happens on the way to the forum. Word-Eater
came out of the practice of playing with words. A lovely woman gave me a plaque
with the advice to be careful with the words we used because one day we may
have to eat them. I started doodling with what it would be like to eat words
and the simple game produced an unusual character that fuelled the story. It
explores the need for people to unload their burdens onto someone who can carry
their misery but will not gossip because they cannot speak. But she has to put
it somewhere for her own sanity so she puts it down on paper.

Gift
of Mouth was based on a dream I had. It kept tugging at my sleeve and in
order to get it off my back I wrote it down. It’s great when stories are given
like that. I certainly like to mix both approaches and I go with the characters
that come in search of me rather than the other way around.

Were
you reading any particular authors at the time of writing ‘Lick of the Lizard’
that influenced you?

The stories that make up that collection
were written within a time frame of at least 10 years. I read a lot of poetry
as it helps me to find the hard, definite word, for both genres so there would
have been a lot of poetry collections read at that time too. I would have been
also reading Ian McEwan, Kasuo Ishiguro, Alice Munro, Flannery O’ Connor and John Mc Gahern would have been my mainstay. I
am sure I assimilated some of their styles along the way. I remember The Irish
Times ran a series of short stories in the paper from international writers
around that time so I cut them out and read and reread them. I still have them
somewhere. My introduction to Jhumpa Lahiri came from the publication (in the
IT) of her story A Real Durwan just
after she won the Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter
of Maladies. I would have also been reading
anthologies of short stories, in particular, the Picador Book of Short Stories
edited by Tobias Wolff. We cannot but be
influenced at a subliminal level by what we read.

End of Guest Post

My greatest thanks to Geraldine and Valerie for this great post. I will shortly post on The Weight of Feathers, the second wonderful short story collection by Mills.

You can learn more about Mills and her work from her very interesting blog. There are good articles on poetry, short stories and art on her webpage and I read all of her posts.

I have posted on two of Valerie's stories, "Man Eater" and "Mirage", both of which are excellent works art and can be read online in links in my posts. I will be posting on all of her available short stories.

Here is the official biography of Valerie Sirr

Valerie Sirr is a writer from Dublin. She began writing after graduating with her Diploma in Advanced Computer Programming from Trinity College, Dublin. She became interested in psychology and studied at University College, Dublin, for her B.A. hons. Psychology degree, going on to study at London’s Institute of Psychiatry. She holds an M. Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin, and has published and broadcast many short stories both in Ireland and Britain with stories currently under consideration in the US. She received the Hennessy New Irish Writer Award and the Hennessy Award for Emerging Fiction and was awarded two Arts Council of Ireland literature bursaries. She also won the William Allingham, Elizabeth Newsom and Nora Fahy short story awards. Her radio play was shortlisted for RTE radio’s PJ O Connor award. She teaches creative writing and literature appreciation, part-time, and has facilitated writing workshops for Dublin Simon Community and other groups in the community. She is in the process of looking for a publisher for her collection of short stories.

You can read some of Valarie's short works of fiction on her webpage. I admire writers with the self-confidence and generosity to make some of their work available to the reading public.

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